Odds and Ends From the Strahan Family Garage Sale

The ex-wife of New York Giant defensive end Michael Strahan held a garage sale at her $3.6 million Montclair, New Jersey, mansion over the weekend saying she can no longer afford to keep the 30-room home, which includes an 8-car garage. Associated Press.

It was a sad day for Jean and Michael Strahan, but only Jean was around to live it; their hopes, their dreams, arrayed along the edges of their quarter-mile-long driveway for all the world to see the dejected state to which they had fallen.

In happier times.

The couple's marriage had ended in a bitter divorce, with the judge awarding Jean $15.3 million and monthly child support of $18,000. It was no wonder she was forced to part with her Garden State Turnpike throw pillows and New York Giants lap blanket--a steal at $450.

"How much you want for this 2001 Defensive Player of the Year Award?"

Strahan has to date paid his wife more than half of what the judge awarded her, but he's holding out on the last $6.5 million. "It's not about the money--it's the principle of the thing," he tells a reporter from the Bergen County Record. "She put all my Earth, Wind & Fire cassettes out on a table in the hot sun, and now they sound like Jabba the Hut on Prozac."

"This here Lamborghini's got a ding in it--you take $80,000 for it?"

For her part, Jean says she is just pinching pennies as any newly-divorced woman should. "How do you put a price tag on a dream?" she asks as a little girl tugs her skirt to ask how much she wants for a Big Wheels riding toy that retails for $99.99 at Toys 'R Us.

"That's $275 sweetie, because the child of the all-time sack leader for the New York Giants rode in it, okay?"

"I have fifty cents."

"I'll take it."

Yeats: A Philadelphia Eagles fan during the Sonny Jurgensen era.

Jean turns back to a reporter who, recalling a line by Yeats that he read in a college English class, asks her whether she will be able to salvage anything from the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" that her once-beloved home has turned into.

"Is it really foul?" she asks, curling up her nose. "We're on town sewer, but sometimes it backs up in the spring."

"Good Lord--it's a life-size Brett Favre doll!"

An elderly woman in a housedress picks through items in a plastic laundry basket, searching for toys for her grandchildren. "Good Lord!" she exclaims. "It's a life-size Brett Favre doll!" And indeed when she holds up the limp figure for inspection it is a dead-ringer for Green Bay's Mr. Durability, going down to allow Strahan to record sack number 22.5 of the 2001 season to top Mark Gastineau's record of 22.